I currently have nine usernames in the array (removed all except Walter from the comment for brevity and privacy), but it's still a pretty small `n`. I don't know at what `n` the set becomes faster than the array, but I haven't noticed any performance impact from the script, and I can't be bothered even googling how to profile it in the browser.

To be fair, Walter is a pretty solid choice. He's a successful businessman and extremely technically smart. There are quite a handful of similar people on here, who are very successful and intelligent and whose comments are always well thought out and insightful. (I want to be one of them one day but my career is just budding, so only time will tell.)

It almost makes me think HN should have a related feature, where people can universally stand out, separate from the leaderboard (link at the bottom). But knowing HN's philosophy, I know this would be against the spirit of the humble-meritocracy they're trying to build, and would do more harm than good.

In fact, I even wonder if this HN-Friends extension is going to have an adverse affect on its users. Right now the usernames are (probably intentionally) understated, to draw more attention to the content than the author. If we notice the person, we already have a bias not only toward their comment, but to read their comment before anyone else's. This goes against the meritocracy that I love about HN. But I also wonder how many thread discussion I had where I missed the context of who is talking, and the direction could have gone so much differently because of it.

And even more importantly, I love and encourage this kind of innovation, and don't in any way want to discourage you or anyone from making clever things like this!

You'd probably want them hashed instead (maybe with a salt based on toplevel thread ID) - while you may prefer to not know who are you reading, you probably want to know whether a series of comments are written by the same person.

Very cool! I think it's especially great that this is a browser plugin instead of a separate website. It's great when developers make things as easy as possible on users. Nice job, I'll be giving it a try!

Agree! I am an app developer, and I like to think about how to make app developers jobs (and onboarding) easier, and the next thing I will write on that vein I think, already decided with the idea and design mostly formulated, will be a Chrome extension (for Pivotal Tracker users that also connect Bitbucket to a CI, to aid in merge request management)

This example is great, as it is open source and supports Firefox too. Maybe I'll do both browsers as well! This HN friends extension does most if not all of the primitive things that I will need to do, so I'm being sincere and I think it's a great publish.

This is super! I was able to understand how to use it right away, installed and upvoted. I don't know how much I will use it, but I have often noticed the same insightful people popping up in discussions I am interested in, and so I will get some value out of it, and I guess I love the logo, too.

I have noticed that sites like reddit and HN feel implicitly anonymous. it'd be interesting to see how this helps reduce some of that. I've been trying my own ways of improving how I interact with people on reddit, maybe I'll try this.

I was meaning to write my own userscript / chrome extension to show a button if there's a reddit-thread with same URL trending in hackernews, so you can click and go to those comments. It would say how many comments there are, and pull up the one with the most upvotes/comments within a 6 month timespan.

Haven't gotten around to it yet unless someone else wants to make it

I made one for my favorite notetaking app though, that I use fairly often. I made a write up of things I learned to write it

Also I would personally prefer for the "tag" box to have a save button next to it. It wasn't clear to me whether it autosaves or if I was supposed to type the name before clicking "add friend". Could just be me though, but I would like this feature. Added this issue so that if people agree or disagree, they can vote on it through thumbs up/down in the Github interface: https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends/issues/1